My Short Story is Under Consideration for Publication!

October 5, 2011

If you haven’t seen in my sidebar, I submitted a story to LDSPublisher’s Christmas Story Contest. My entry was “Alexa’s Custom Cookies” which you can read on her site. It is about a mother who tries to create good gluten-free sugar cookies for her daughter, who has celiac disease.

The results for the contest are in. I did not win, but I am under consideration for publication in her Christmas Story Anthology. Here are LDSPublisher’s comments:

Critique: This is a great way to raise awareness of celiac’s, but you need a little more tension and conflict to make it a really good story. It starts good, but slows down when Mom is trying all the recipes. Add some tension there. The ending is also a bit of a so-what. Add something from Alexa about how wonderful the party was and/or something about making more for Santa. And it definitely should include the recipe!

What I liked best: The uniqueness of the celiac twist.

Publication ready: Close. Jazz it up just a little.

Your story is under consideration for publication in the next Christmas anthology.

I am not surprised by these comments. A lot of them were already brought up by my writing group. I tried to address them, but obviously I need to do better. I also didn’t include a recipe because I wasn’t sure that it would be appropriate in an anthology of short stories.

LDSPublisher says she will make final decisions of who to include in the anthology in January. Even if I am not included, I plan on doing a rewrite and offering the story, along with a recipe for a gluten-free, dairy-free, soy-free, good tasting sugar cookie, as an e-book available from Kindle and Smashwords (which will push to Nook and iBooks). I’ll give myself a deadline of Fall 2012 for that.

So I better get busy in the kitchen, if I’m going to have an experience like Kelly did and take over a dozen attempts to get the right recipe. What are your experiences with baking gluten-free sugar cookies? Do you have a good recipe?